B2 First for Schools and C1 Advanced: Speaking Part 3 – Ed Tech

Description
This lesson plan is designed to help students prepare for B2 First for Schools / C1 Advanced Speaking
Part 3, the collaborative task. It can be delivered face to face or online. The ‘online options’ column
gives teachers ideas how the stages could be adapted for teaching online.

Note to teachers
You can use the lesson plan as a starting point and create your own PowerPoint slides to use in the
lesson. If you are teaching with an online platform, use the functionality that you have available to you.
Many platforms have the option to share your screen with the students. Before class, use offline
resources such as Microsoft PowerPoint to prepare any materials you want to use. With some
platforms, like Zoom, you can share a whiteboard with the students, which you can work on in real
time. However, it might be easier to use a Word document with the text already prepared, which you
need to share electronically with your students e.g. by email. This way, students have the content
ready to use in the lesson.

Time required: 60 minutes (can be extended or shortened as required).

Materials  Prepared presentation/PowerPoint slides
required:  Internet video link to:
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_bodekaer_this_virtual_lab_will_revol
utionize_science_class
 Student Handout (see below)

Aims:  To encourage students to reflect on the future of education and the

impact of new technologies on teaching and learning
 To practise authentic listening
 To encourage students to discuss and work towards a negotiated
outcome (Part 3 Speaking task)

Procedure
Lesson Stages Online options
Welcome students – ask them say hello to confirm they can see If your platform allows you to see your
and hear you. students, ask them to also wave and check
everything is working as it should be.
Warm up (15 minutes) – whole class activity or in pairs/small Show the warm up questions on a
groups PowerPoint slide.

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 • How is education today different from the way your Pairs and small groups:
parents learned?
• What digital resources and tools do you use in your
classroom?
• What digital resources and tools do you use when you
study at home?
• What are their advantages and disadvantages?
• How will teaching and learning change in 20 years’ time?
Listening (20 minutes) – individual.
Students are going to watch a video* (click to open hyperlink)
about how virtual reality can revolutionise science lessons.
Talk through the Listening questions on the student handout and https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_bode
check understanding before playing the video.
Students refer to the questions in the handout and watch the
video.
They are going to watch the video twice.
*It is not necessary to watch the whole video as answers can be
found from the beginning of the video until 3’53’’.
Feedback (5 minutes) – in pairs.
Discuss answers by speaking aloud or typing into the chat box
Confirm answers for the whole class on a PowerPoint slide (see
Teacher material below).
• If the platform has breakout rooms,
put students into pairs or threes to
discuss ideas.
• Bring the class back together for
whole group feedback.
Discuss with the whole class:
• Ask students to speak up if your
platform allows you to hear them or
use the chat window to type their
ideas and answers.
• In larger groups, the chat box is a
helpful option when eliciting ideas and
getting feedback.
Provide the Listening questions from the
student handout on a PowerPoint slide.
Embed the link into the PowerPoint slide for
quick access.
kaer_this_virtual_lab_will_revolutionize_
science_class
Students make notes of the answers before
feedback.
Breakout rooms: Pairs/ threes discuss
answers.
Elicit answers from class if your students
can speak on your platform.
Elicit answers into the chat box if there is
not an option for speaking aloud on your
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 platform.
Show answers on a prepared PowerPoint
slide.
Speaking and feedback (20 minutes) – in pairs. If you have break-out rooms on your
platform:
Show the mind map from the Student Handout on a PowerPoint
Put students into pairs or threes to discuss
slide and check understanding.
before regrouping as a whole class for
Remind students of the details of the discussion phase of the feedback on the communicative task/
problem-solving task.
Part 3 Collaborative Task in B2 First for Schools and C1
Advanced:
Chat box option:
Students discuss for 2 minutes, which is followed by a 1 minute
If your students don’t have access to break-
decision-making task. out rooms, open up a whole class spoken
discussion or conduct the discussion using
Students discuss together. The task is to complete the mind
the chat box.
map with five benefits that virtual reality can have for education,
1. Pose questions and indicate by name
using the ideas generated in the lesson and from the video. which student you would like to
Invite pairs to share ideas in whole-class feedback. respond.

If there is time, watch the remainder of the video, or students
can watch the rest of the video at home. Ask students to think
about the following questions:
1. What other points were mentioned in the video?
2. What did you learn about this topic?
2. Once the student has responded, ask
the class to comment and add their
ideas.
3. Pose another question to another
student and elicit another idea in
response to the communicative
task/problem solving question.

While the chat box option is not the perfect

solution, the advantage is that students will
be able to practise writing for fluency
without concern for accuracy.

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Student Handout

Listening

You are going to watch a video* on TED.com about how virtual reality can revolutionise science lessons.
Read the questions first and then watch the video. You are going to watch the video twice.

Questions

1) Who is going to help us solve the great challenges that we are facing nowadays and that will continue to
grow?

2) How do students in many universities around the world feel, according to Michael Bodekaer?

3) Where did Michael and his co-founder find the inspiration for his idea to use virtual reality in the science
class?

4) Michael mentions three advantages of using virtual reality in the science class. They are:

1.

2.

3.

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Student Handout
Speaking part 3

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Teacher Material
KEY TO LISTENING ACTIVITY

1) Who is going to help us solve the great challenges that we are facing nowadays and that will continue to
grow? Young science students / the next generation of young, bright scientists.

2) How do students in many universities around the world feel, according to Michael Bodekaer? Bored,
disengaged, not sure about why they’re learning the topic.

3) Where did Michael and his co-founder find the inspiration for his idea to use virtual reality in the science
class? From flight simulators used in in-flight (pilot) training.

4) Michael mentions three advantages of using virtual reality in the science class. Write these down:

1. universities can save money by letting students perform virtual experiments in virtual labs

2. students get to learn and understand the lab machines

3. students can carry out dangerous experiments, risk free

TAPESCRIPT
Today, I am going to show you how this tablet and this virtual-reality headset that I'm wearing are going to
completely revolutionise science education. And I'm also going to show you how it can make any science
teacher more than twice as effective. But before I show you how all of this is possible, let's talk briefly about
why improving the quality of science education is so vitally important.
00:35
If you think about it, the world is growing incredibly fast. And with that growth comes a whole list of growing
challenges, challenges such as dealing with global warming, solving starvation and water shortages and
curing diseases, to name just a few.
00:51
(1) And who, exactly, is going to help us solve all of these great challenges? Well, to a very last degree, it is
these young students. This is the next generation of young, bright scientists. And in many ways, we all rely
on them for coming up with new, great innovations to help us solve all these challenges ahead of us. And
so a couple of years back, my co-founder and I were teaching university students just like these, only the
students we were teaching looked a little bit more like this here.
01:27
(Laughter)
01:28
(2) And yes, this is really the reality out there in way too many universities around the world: students that
are bored, disengaged and sometimes not even sure why they're learning about a topic in the first place.

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01:43
So we started looking around for new, innovative teaching methods, but what we found was quite
disappointing. We saw that books were being turned into e-books, blackboards were being turned into
YouTube videos and lecture hall monologues were being turned into MOOCs -- massive online open
courses. And if you think about it, all we're really doing here is taking the same content and the same
format, and bringing it out to more students -- which is great, don't get me wrong, that is really great -- but
the teaching method is still more or less the same, no real innovation there.
02:23
(3) So we started looking elsewhere. What we found was that flight simulators had been proven over and
over again to be far more effective when used in combination with real, in-flight training to train the pilots.
And so we thought to ourselves: Why not just apply that to science? Why not build a virtual laboratory
simulator?
02:47
(4) Well, we did it. We basically set out to create a fully simulated, one-to-one, virtual reality laboratory
simulator, where the students could perform experiments with mathematical equations that would simulate
what would happen in a real-world lab. But not just simple simulations -- we would also create advanced
simulations with top universities like MIT, to bring out cutting-edge cancer research to these students. And
suddenly, the universities could save millions of dollars by letting the students perform virtual experiments
before they go into the real laboratory. And not only that; now, they could also understand -- even on a
molecular level inside the machine -- what is happening to the machines. And then they could suddenly
perform dangerous experiments in the labs as well. For instance also here, learning about salmonella
bacteria, which is an important topic that many schools cannot teach for good safety reasons. And we, of
course, quiz the students and then give the teachers a full dashboard, so they fully understand where the
students are at.

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Teacher Material

Speaking part 3 and suggested answers.

 ‘teleportation’: learners can ‘travel’ to places they can’t visit in reality

 learners can experience cultures and history first hand (the ‘time machine effect’)

 learners can engage with the lesson content in a multi-sensory way

 learners can be actively autonomous (can choose their own path within the virtual experience)

 they can develop skills in a secure and safe environment

 they are engulfed with the learning content (focussed immersion – no distractions)

 the interest level is high

 learner engagement is high

 there is no language barrier

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References

Bodekaer, M. (2015). TED Ideas worth spreading. This virtual lab will revolutionize science class. Available
at:
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_bodekaer_this_virtual_lab_will_revolutionize_science_cla
ss#t-148332